ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with narrative development from the perspective of the kind of narrative input that children from middle-class literate families receive from their parents in two different languages and cultural backgrounds: English-speaking Australian and Hebrew-speaking Israeli. The specific objective of the study is to delineate features of Australian and Hebrew parental story-telling practices that may be conducive to the children's acquisition of the cultural and linguistic knowledge appropriate for narrative construction. The chapter gives the report on the nature of parent-child narrative interactions produced in naturalistic conditions parents tell the story used to elicit the narratives in Berman and Slobin. The children and their parents were monolingual Hebrew speakers in Israel and monolingual English speakers in Australia. English-language recordings were transcribed in standard orthography. Hebrew-language recordings were transcribed in a modified broad phonemic script. This provide some explanation of cultural differences found in the approaches of the Israeli and Australian parents, the age differences found within the Australian data.
